ItemBuildr

One idea that came up at a recent meeting was to build an ItemBuildr site similar to ForumBuildr. I wanted to run it by you guys:

The idea is a contest where people build items for the game. The winning items are automatically put into the economy and can be purchased.

The reasoning for this is that ForumBuildr remains popular after all this time. Also, when we ran the Junk contest it was also insanely popular. People just love the idea of their items becoming part of the game universe.

Here’s how I was thinking it could work:

Rounds would last a couple of days. The site would predetermine the stats, category and price, say something like:

Category: Glasses
Price: 1,000 Flezz
Stats: +3 charisma

Then people have to submit the rest. That would be: the name, the description and the image.

Right now I was thinking that all three of those could be submitted by one person. We would have to make sure the image is creative commons or something, so there might be an additional field where you provide a link to the source image you used.

Then, people would vote on the various items. The winning item automatically gets put into the game, and the winner gets one.

Good Idea imo, but we need to keep it devoted rather than INCIT and ForumBuildr’s shit.

IE, if you’re making a parody Glasses/Tattoo/Fetish, You’d need every bit to make sense. You wouldn’t want your fetish to be Straight Shotacon and have the picture be an image of a dead turkey with buzzards.

Therefore, you need a complete submission, or at the very least keep the name/picture together option/requirement

Are you not worried about the users getting you in trouble by using copyrighted images? I feel like the average person isn’t going to be nearly as judicious as you guys about only using royalty-free or public-domain photos.

I agree with Master_Troll here – people are going to have different ideas on the elements (picture, description, name) of a given item are gonna fit together – either that, or they won’t care at all. Crowdsourcing item production sounds cool, but it would probably cause a lot more problems than it is worth (i.e., Master_Troll’s shotacon-dead-turkey-with-buzzards fetish and other such thematically incoherent items) So yeah, sorry, nix that idea – it wouldn’t work out very well.
A MoarFileBuildr might be more (no pun intended) workable, since there’s no picture or description involved, just a name.

I think this could work, provided that, as Jick said, the images used are creative commons and you retain the right to reject item descriptions (even "winning" ones) if they don’t feel up to par with what you already have in the game.

Sounds like a good idea…if it’s implemented well. New multiplayer features are always fun. My only concern is that it might get stale, like INCIT. Maybe have a theme week every once and a while to mix things up? Definatly looking forward to this.

I’d actually almost recommend not doing items (except maybe Junk items) and instead letting people submit images for the in-game attacks which use various pictures: New background images for the Hacker attacks, new photos for the Emo kid attacks, some new hamsters for the Re-Res…. or, terrifying as it may sound, even shots for the Camwhore attacks. Getting some more variety in the attack images would definitely be nice, as most don’t have very many different pictures and can get a bit repetitive.

I think that Correnth’s idea of having players add new images to the existing attacks is terrific! Trying to find safe for work images for the Cam Whores would definitely be great fun, and seeing some new images when pwning forums would be fantastic.

I think it would be better if we didnt vote on it, and the mods picked the winners. IMO its more important to have good items in the game than community forums, and some of the stuff in forumbuildr isnt the best (of course there is some really great stuff too!).